This Thursday, January 26, Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE) at the University of Michigan — Ann Arbor will be bringing renown author, journalist, and commentator Ali Abunimah for a groundbreaking lecture discussing, “Colonial Reality: Dismantling the Myths of Israeli Democracy. Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse, will address the campus community on the reality of Israel’s claim as the region’s only beacon of light, a terms it regularly assigns to itself. (Editor’s note: Event information can be found at the end of this post.)
Rhetoric surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict has continuously revolved around the argument that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Such claims are not only false and biased, but have harsh implications in terms of the public opinion regarding the question of Palestine. These falsehoods propagated by the media and other outlets have lead to the pardoning of Israel for their blatant racist, discriminatory and colonizing practices and have characterized the Israeli government as the only nation in the Middle East that has any promising future because of its democratic ideals. These falsehoods lead to the Israeli exceptionalism that we see so often. Forgetting about the war crimes, violations of international law, illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing of a people, we see figures of power praising Israel for democratic traits they do not truly possess. We hope that this event will shine light on the realities of the that most college-age students at a public university may never hear. This topic is crucial because it will, as the title suggests, dismantle the myths that have been propagating popular opinion. [Read more...]
American-Israeli discontent with Egypt’s Revolution and the rest of the Middle East
Four weeks have passed since the beginning of the people’s revolution in Egypt and while much of the world celebrates the fall of a dictator and his brutal regime by protesting neighboring dictators in the Arab world, the United States and Israel together stand knee deep in a pool of misconception and disappointment.
January 25 marked the first day of protests in Egypt. Calling for an end to government corruption, police brutality, and violations against social and civil liberties, the crowds of protestors quickly grew in both size and power until finally, on February 11, after almost three weeks of braving state-sponsored intimidation and incitement, Hosni Mubarak waived his office of presidency and fled Cairo. Egypt took its first step toward true democracy and other countries quickly followed suit.
Like many others, I naïvely expected the United States to champion the Egyptian people for their impassioned determination to peacefully bring about democratic reform to a country in which the self-chosen president selfishly amassed $70 billion in personal assets while half of the population lived hungrily on less than $2 a day. But even at the onset of the revolution, the Obama administration made its stance clear: Vice President Biden declared his trust in Mubarak, Hillary Clinton implicitly urged the protestors to reconsider, and President Obama himself failed to support or even acknowledge what conservative news sources managed to frame as the looming threat of democracy in an Arab country. [Read more...]